I'm curious - can anyone name a high quality industry product made by brits ?

[Perfection]

Oil Spills!

[MikeH]

Media over there seems to miss the fact that BP are 50% US owned. I guess it's the name?

[Al B. Sure!]

Media over there seems to miss the fact that BP are 50% US owned. I guess it's the name?

It hasn't been British Petroleum since 1999 when it acquired Amoco. BP is its legal name.

[MikeH]

Are you telling me that because you think I don't know?

[Saras]

I own very neatly designed speakers, a CD player, a preamp and a power amp all made in UK. Not sure of the colour of the collars of people assembling them.

[Provost Harrison]

Well it's nice to see BlackCat well and truly owned in this thread. We make a lot of drugs over here I can tell you that. That's why most of my working life has been involved with the pharmaceutical sector in one form or another.

[MikeH]

We don't make very much though, our manufacturing sector is tiny.

[C0ckney]

We make a lot of drugs over here I can tell you that.

true dat!

[Dinner]

That's a very unfair portrayal, and I'm certainly no Thatcher fan.

British Leyland was a joke.

It was unmanageable before it was nationalised, partially because all the separate "brands" (goodness knows how many there where) were in competition with each other rather than cooperating, even though the marques were essentially the same. This came about mainly because of botched Labour industrial policy in the late 60s.

The models were never updated, no effort was made to fit product to market which put them at a massive disadvantage with Ford etc. who actually did. BL managers spent most of their time negotiating with militant trade unions rather than actually running the company. Instead, shop stewards (Derek Robinson being the prime offender) would run the joint who would go on strike for all sorts of ridiculous reasons like a break being 5 minutes late or some such on Robbo's command.

Hardly surprising it went bust.

Thatcher and co. have their part of the blame to take, but it was long on the road to death before then.

It could have been reformed. You keep the largest differentiated brands and kill or spin off the rest then consolidate advertising and R&D money on the three or four remaining brands or alternatively you spin off the brands you don't want under a new company and hope for an eventual foreign buyer. For instance, I would have kept Jaguar, Rover/Land Rover, MG, and Austin as BL then spin the rest off on their own.

In any event it wasn't just BL but also the coal industry and literally every other bit of nationalized heavy industry (which is to say all heavy industry in the country) which also got dumped and killed one after another. She set them up so that no matter what they did they would die by slow starvation deprived of the capital needed to modernize and be competitive. She's the reason the 80's were pretty much a lost decade in the UK with sky high unemployment.

[Dinner]

Owned by Ford

Not for years now. It's owned by the Indians of all people at Tata, same with Jag.

[Dinner]

Under JLR, which Ford sold to India's Tata Motors in 2008. They're still built in England but they'll move to China, apparently.

Aston Martin is sort-of British owned, as it's owned by a consortium of British businessmen and a Kuwaiti investment company IIRC who bought it from Ford. You could also include Caterham and McLaren if you want to as well.

I believe TVR is the largest all British owned car company left though I can't remember if they got sold to a Russian investor or not. I know there was talk of a sale but I don't think it went through. Last I heard some old guy in Blackpool owned it.

[duke o' york]

Britain has a great industry producing top-quality troll threads, rivalling the US in some cases, but definitely making a far superior product to anything from the rest of Europe.

[Dinner]

I own very neatly designed speakers, a CD player, a preamp and a power amp all made in UK. Not sure of the colour of the collars of people assembling them.

Which brands?

[BlackCat]

OK, can we just all agree that BlackCat failed miserably at his troll attempt?

This isn't a trolling attempt but a genuine question - the question was asked here :

http://ing.dk/artikel/110802-livet-er-for-kort-til-britiske-haandvaerkere

and since I couldn't recall any, I just wanted to hear if poly could help.

[Snotty]

This isn't a trolling attempt but a genuine question :

I have to say the question didnt seem like a troll to me. Ive found this thread most informative